To the other commenters: Do you have any examples?
Also, I’m excited about auto deployment. The less tools one needs to get software shipped, the better.
On Github you can easily see what happens, comments are surrounded by a black border, the name of the comment author and the date are clearly visible and have a different background color from the comment text. Actions like closing and re-opening are distinctly different from comments and are color coded (green -> re-opened, red -> closed, purple -> merged). Emoticons are part of the comment box and don't visually drift into the next one.
Gitlab on the other hand separates comments by a thin (1px) light-grey line that is hardly visible on low contrast monitors like TN displays. Closing and re-opening is also displayed as a light-grey icon on a white background. The author's name has the same color as the comment text, with the date being, again, light-grey. Nothing keeps the contents of a comment together, it's all just text on a white background. The emoticons are just floating around the comments, with the same margin to the next comment as to the comment they are belonging to. So you have to know that emoticons are always below a comment.
Github's design is far, far superior to Gitlab's design because it allows skimming instead of concentrating on finding where each comment begins and ends.
[1] - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/32794
[2] - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues?scope=all&utf...
My biggest gripe is just that the issue elements (comments, actions, label changes, description edits) are looking too similar for a quick glance. The light-grey font on a white background makes it pretty hard. My suggestion would be to do it a bit like Gihub and to add a black border around stuff, take another background color for actions, and get rid of the grey font and replace it with black throughout.
Loading a page could load almost instantly but most of the time it did load after 2 or 3 seconds.
Gitlab does not work well when resources are scarce, it does require a bit of a beefy server to get fast and reactive, atleast in my experience.
I've found Gitea/Gogs to be a product more focused on running something like Gitlab with much less resources.
For personal and home use Gitea/Gogs is probably a better choice indeed. As you point out it runs with much fewer resources and as an added bonus it runs as a single go binary which simplifies hosting it tremendously. You could literally just download the binary and run "$ ./gitea web". Gitlab is another beast in that respect, especially if you do not opt for their Omnibus install.
The navigation is still a bit convoluted, but has gotten better. There are still some issues of nested navigation menus and difficult to find pages. As far as page speed goes it has gotten better and they are actively working on this.
As long as the rate of improvement is as good as it is I see no reason to switch to another solution. Especially seeing how the community edition is free and satisfies basic developer needs.
Gitlab is also the only code repository service which integrates CI jobs and statuses as well as a front-end for a self-hosted docker registry. Absolutely a killer feature!